It might be nice for iTunes to offer a subscription to their music library instead of letting people listen to only 30 seconds of a song. Then if I really liked a song I could get it unlocked for 99 cents so I could listen to it ever afterwards even if I cancelled my subscription.
That's an exact description of the Napster service.
Not sure if you're reading responses, but are they doing any on-demand upgrades in the Apple store? Say, if you wanted 512MB and the Airport/BT combo, can they do those while you wait?
Keyboards might have gotten a lot better since I was last looking, but usually keyboard USB ports are only USB 1.1. Better than nothing, but kinda unfortunate.
Nah, I keep an eye on my process list for rogue processes and run virus and adware scans periodically. Besides, if I ever had one, I would still have it (or I would have manually cleaned it myself). My machines right now are all clean.
Again, it's not like I did anything tremendously insightful -- just turned on automatic patching and firewall and kept an eye on my system for weird behavior. And don't say 'yes' to Comet Cursor and its ilk.
I have a WinXP machine and a Mac at work, two WinXp laptops and a WinXP desktop at home and I've never had a virus or worm either. If you're careful (i.e., firewall your machine, preferably with a hardware router that you probably need anyway), and don't say 'yes' to ActiveX controls you don't trust, you don't get these things.
Wow, you're right; it doesn't support Firefox. I switch back and forth -- and don't use Movielink regularly anyway-- so I didn't realize. I stand corrected (although I'm willing to bet that there are more IE users on/. than would readily admit it, esp. since Firefox hoses the layout).
My only point was that Apple's store, if it comes to exist, will surely only work with Apple's software and Apple's portable hardware, and because of the Reality Distortion Field, that will be reconstrued as a Good Thing.
Nothing really against Apple; it's just funny how they get a pass for everything.
Yeah, it's really bizarre. There are non-Apple-based movie stores that work just great and plenty of non-iPod portable players to watch them on (from Archos, Creative, etc.), but it's not interesting news until Apple is rumored to be doing it. Gimme a break.
The Xbox was ultimately a poor investment for anyone who bought it. Sure Halo's 1&2 are system sellers. But then what? There were scant few good titles for Xbox.
Not that old saw again. There are more good games for the Xbox than there is time for any reasonable person to play. There are more than 100 Xbox games on GameRankings with scores above 80%. Xbox gets its share of original games (Halo, KOTOR, DOA, Crimson Skies, MechAssault, Ninja Gaiden) and, almost always, the best versions of multiplatform games, plus XBL.
I agree that all the prick-waving about whose processor is more powerful is boring, but there's some great stuff out there for the Xbox.
Dude! That's really helpful; thanks for posting that link. I didn't want to crank out the $ for Sorenson Squeeze just to put up FLVs of my son, but that's exactly what I needed.
Y'know, though this whole thread, I've been trying to have a civil conversation with you and you keep throwing around this attitude just because I dare disagree with you.
Maybe you just don't know how you come off, but you don't come off well. Hell, you even contradict yourself in the post I'm responding to from the first sentence to the next.
Firefox, for a very new browser, has made huge strides. Of course it's not going to storm out of the gates with a 50% marketshare, but it's gone from non-existence to, what, the No. 2 browser in less than a year? It's a success already in its 1.0 version by any estimation and the trends are in its favor.
Especially true '97 when people mostly had slow modems to fetch large programs.
Not sure what you're getting at here -- even though it took a while, people downloaded browsers over modems by the millions in the late 90s. Or they bought books that had CDs in them or got copies from friends. Are you really suggesting that Netscape died because people didn't have the bandwidth to get it?
True, I overstated it -- they did make security updates to the product, but very little else. The core rendering engine (which was the part that needed the most help) and sat fallow for years, which was my point, and there wasn't really anything new added to the interface either. Since these were the major growth years of the Internet, it was kind of a bad time to stop innovating your product.
If only a major version number counts for development then there was no Internet Explorer development from version 5.0 (March 2000) and version 6.0 (August 2002) and no Internet Explorer development from August 2002 to January 2005.
You're absolutely right, which is why so many people are looking at Firefox. History could very well repeat itself here, this time in Firefox's favor.
Integrating it into the OS helped, definitely, but if Netscape had continued to be a better browser (a la Firefox), its marketshare wouldn't have eroded anywhere near the way it did. If you don't believe that, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
If bundling is all you need, then how can you explain the success of Firefox? People will move when the product is substantially better, regardless of bundling. Netscape 4 wasn't, so it died.
Uhm, why don't you reread my original post: "MS competed with Netscape by making their product better and cheaper, while Netscape stalled development of Navigator for years."
I never said that IE killed Netscape because it was bundled (though I'm sure that helped adoption, especially once IE started gaining momentum) -- I said that Netscape killed itself by not releasing an update of its software from 1997 until 2000. They weren't even trying to compete with Microsoft, except in the courtroom.
Netscape was, for all intents and purposes, free itself. Virtually no one paid for it anyway because of abuse of the "free for academic use" clause.
I say it again, it wasn't because IE was free that it won, or because it was bundled with Windows (though that surely helped). Netscape didn't do any development on Navigator for YEARS at a time when the Internet was booming and they let MS take their thunder away. Netscape removed its own oxygen supply by not coming out with anything new or worthwhile -- or have you forgotten what a pile of hackery Netscape 4.0 was?
It's the same deal today with Firefox. IE is resting on its laurels, so Firefox is gaining marketshare. It's the way the market works; it's just that Netscape hoped the Justice Department would do its work for them.
Microsoft illegally tied Internet Explorer to Windows and killed Netscape the company.
Er... if I recall, AOL bought Netscape for $4.2 BILLION. This was a company that didn't exist a couple of years before. No company that went from zero to $4+ billion in value can be said to have been "killed." AOL let them die is more like it.
Netscape was on the virge of having a full blown, cross platform Client/Server based web solution.
If PR was product, you'd be right, but they were pretty far from actually delivering anything (unless you remember Netcaster as being a particularly brilliant piece of software).
MS competed with Netscape by making their product better and cheaper, while Netscape stalled development of Navigator for years. Netscape wasn't killed; it killed itself.
But look at what Gmail's become: it's a cultural phenomenon.
Let's not go crazy. Once the hype died down, Gmail pretty much became just another Webmail service with an interesting interface and a lot of storage. It's really not as hot as the hype would suggest and had it been from anyone but Google, no one would have really cared. eBay's littered with latecomers trying to cash in their invites, but it looks like they're down to asking for a couple of dimes now.
To say that Gmail's second-place to an iPod in terms of being a cultural phenomenon is an overstatement, I think.
So the thing about commodity PC market is not that prices keep going down: Performance keeps going up! So if you spend $2k on a computer today, and $2k on a computer next year, you get a computer roughly 110% better. Or upgrade the ram for $200. Then upgrade the video card for $300. Then buy a new hard drive for $300. Then replace the power supply for $80. Then get a new CPU for $150.
Actually, we're both right -- performance is going up while prices are going down on commodity PCs. Now it's happening on the Mac platform too. The market for old, used Macs is about to go kerblooey because no one's going to want to buy an old 500MHz G4 off of eBay because of the Mac mini. It's the exact same situation and doesn't have anything to do with some magical ability of the Mac to retain its value.
I understand what you're saying, but you're kinda missing my point. The reason PC prices go down is because the price of brand new PCs continue to drop. As a consumer, that's not a bad thing.
Look at it another way -- what's the value of a low-end Mac now that the Mac mini is out? You think there's a market for 400MHz G4s anymore? The used Mac market is about to experience the same depreciation as the PC market and that's a good thing for everybody.
Re:And here are the more interesting posts:
on
Apple Releases Mac Mini
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It ain't paranoia, yo. From http://www.apple.com/macmini/:
Mac mini offers plenty of juice to power your digital life, but you can kick it into overdrive with extras. Add the SuperDrive option to burn DVDs of your home movies or to make a backup of the music or audiobooks you buy at the iTunes Music Store. You can minimize the desktop clutter of cables with wireless connections. Surf wirelessly with an AirPort Extreme Card installed in your Mac mini. Or configure your Mac mini with internal Bluetooth to use wireless keyboards and mice. You can also choose up to 1GB RAM and increase the 40GB hard drive to 80GB. Some of these options must be installed by Apple at the factory; the rest can be added in-store at an Apple Store or an Apple authorized reseller.
Second I am a Navy Veteran (FTN & PAPERCLIP awards) whose skin crawled when Kerry gave his lifer "reporting for duty salute"... something is not right with this dude... thank you SwiftVets and POWS for Truth for confirming my gut feelings as a Navy Veteran about Kerry
In other words, the SBVfT told you what you wanted to hear. They've admitted that they're just pissed off that Kerry protested the Viet Nam war and were going to get him by any means necessary and they did.
Macs seem to hold their value really well so I don't feel bad about spending extra on it.
I've always found this to be a really weird argument. Who buys a computer because it "keeps its value" (read: replacing it is just as expensive as when I bought it)? The great thing about the commodity PC market is that prices keep going down. Sure, your old PC isn't worth anything, but you can get a spiffy new one for less money as well. As a consumer, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
I kinda like a world where a 3GHz P4 with a gig of RAM is less than a thousand bucks myself, but Mac folks seem to like that a top-end machine starts at about $1,500 because they have this illusion that it's an investment.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, hey, how about some spoiler warnings? The first season hasn't finished airing in the U.S. yet.
It might be nice for iTunes to offer a subscription to their music library instead of letting people listen to only 30 seconds of a song. Then if I really liked a song I could get it unlocked for 99 cents so I could listen to it ever afterwards even if I cancelled my subscription.
That's an exact description of the Napster service.
Not sure if you're reading responses, but are they doing any on-demand upgrades in the Apple store? Say, if you wanted 512MB and the Airport/BT combo, can they do those while you wait?
Keyboards might have gotten a lot better since I was last looking, but usually keyboard USB ports are only USB 1.1. Better than nothing, but kinda unfortunate.
Nah, I keep an eye on my process list for rogue processes and run virus and adware scans periodically. Besides, if I ever had one, I would still have it (or I would have manually cleaned it myself). My machines right now are all clean.
Again, it's not like I did anything tremendously insightful -- just turned on automatic patching and firewall and kept an eye on my system for weird behavior. And don't say 'yes' to Comet Cursor and its ilk.
Not a lie at all -- I'm in the same boat.
I have a WinXP machine and a Mac at work, two WinXp laptops and a WinXP desktop at home and I've never had a virus or worm either. If you're careful (i.e., firewall your machine, preferably with a hardware router that you probably need anyway), and don't say 'yes' to ActiveX controls you don't trust, you don't get these things.
Wow, you're right; it doesn't support Firefox. I switch back and forth -- and don't use Movielink regularly anyway-- so I didn't realize. I stand corrected (although I'm willing to bet that there are more IE users on /. than would readily admit it, esp. since Firefox hoses the layout).
My only point was that Apple's store, if it comes to exist, will surely only work with Apple's software and Apple's portable hardware, and because of the Reality Distortion Field, that will be reconstrued as a Good Thing.
Nothing really against Apple; it's just funny how they get a pass for everything.
Yeah, it's really bizarre. There are non-Apple-based movie stores that work just great and plenty of non-iPod portable players to watch them on (from Archos, Creative, etc.), but it's not interesting news until Apple is rumored to be doing it. Gimme a break.
How long until the cries of "Garth Jennings raped my childhood" begin?
The Xbox was ultimately a poor investment for anyone who bought it. Sure Halo's 1&2 are system sellers. But then what? There were scant few good titles for Xbox.
Not that old saw again. There are more good games for the Xbox than there is time for any reasonable person to play. There are more than 100 Xbox games on GameRankings with scores above 80%. Xbox gets its share of original games (Halo, KOTOR, DOA, Crimson Skies, MechAssault, Ninja Gaiden) and, almost always, the best versions of multiplatform games, plus XBL.
I agree that all the prick-waving about whose processor is more powerful is boring, but there's some great stuff out there for the Xbox.
Dude! That's really helpful; thanks for posting that link. I didn't want to crank out the $ for Sorenson Squeeze just to put up FLVs of my son, but that's exactly what I needed.
Really, give it a rest. I tried to have a civil conversation with you, but it's not worth it. Believe what you want to; I don't care.
I think you're a troll. Goodbye.
Y'know, though this whole thread, I've been trying to have a civil conversation with you and you keep throwing around this attitude just because I dare disagree with you.
Maybe you just don't know how you come off, but you don't come off well. Hell, you even contradict yourself in the post I'm responding to from the first sentence to the next.
Whatever. Post back when you turn 18.
Firefox, for a very new browser, has made huge strides. Of course it's not going to storm out of the gates with a 50% marketshare, but it's gone from non-existence to, what, the No. 2 browser in less than a year? It's a success already in its 1.0 version by any estimation and the trends are in its favor.
Especially true '97 when people mostly had slow modems to fetch large programs.
Not sure what you're getting at here -- even though it took a while, people downloaded browsers over modems by the millions in the late 90s. Or they bought books that had CDs in them or got copies from friends. Are you really suggesting that Netscape died because people didn't have the bandwidth to get it?
True, I overstated it -- they did make security updates to the product, but very little else. The core rendering engine (which was the part that needed the most help) and sat fallow for years, which was my point, and there wasn't really anything new added to the interface either. Since these were the major growth years of the Internet, it was kind of a bad time to stop innovating your product.
If only a major version number counts for development then there was no Internet Explorer development from version 5.0 (March 2000) and version 6.0 (August 2002) and no Internet Explorer development from August 2002 to January 2005.
You're absolutely right, which is why so many people are looking at Firefox. History could very well repeat itself here, this time in Firefox's favor.
Integrating it into the OS helped, definitely, but if Netscape had continued to be a better browser (a la Firefox), its marketshare wouldn't have eroded anywhere near the way it did. If you don't believe that, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
If bundling is all you need, then how can you explain the success of Firefox? People will move when the product is substantially better, regardless of bundling. Netscape 4 wasn't, so it died.
Uhm, why don't you reread my original post: "MS competed with Netscape by making their product better and cheaper, while Netscape stalled development of Navigator for years."
:)
I never said that IE killed Netscape because it was bundled (though I'm sure that helped adoption, especially once IE started gaining momentum) -- I said that Netscape killed itself by not releasing an update of its software from 1997 until 2000. They weren't even trying to compete with Microsoft, except in the courtroom.
If I'm drunk, you're on hallucinogens, man.
Netscape was, for all intents and purposes, free itself. Virtually no one paid for it anyway because of abuse of the "free for academic use" clause.
I say it again, it wasn't because IE was free that it won, or because it was bundled with Windows (though that surely helped). Netscape didn't do any development on Navigator for YEARS at a time when the Internet was booming and they let MS take their thunder away. Netscape removed its own oxygen supply by not coming out with anything new or worthwhile -- or have you forgotten what a pile of hackery Netscape 4.0 was?
It's the same deal today with Firefox. IE is resting on its laurels, so Firefox is gaining marketshare. It's the way the market works; it's just that Netscape hoped the Justice Department would do its work for them.
Microsoft illegally tied Internet Explorer to Windows and killed Netscape the company.
Er... if I recall, AOL bought Netscape for $4.2 BILLION. This was a company that didn't exist a couple of years before. No company that went from zero to $4+ billion in value can be said to have been "killed." AOL let them die is more like it.
Netscape was on the virge of having a full blown, cross platform Client/Server based web solution.
If PR was product, you'd be right, but they were pretty far from actually delivering anything (unless you remember Netcaster as being a particularly brilliant piece of software).
MS competed with Netscape by making their product better and cheaper, while Netscape stalled development of Navigator for years. Netscape wasn't killed; it killed itself.
But look at what Gmail's become: it's a cultural phenomenon.
Let's not go crazy. Once the hype died down, Gmail pretty much became just another Webmail service with an interesting interface and a lot of storage. It's really not as hot as the hype would suggest and had it been from anyone but Google, no one would have really cared. eBay's littered with latecomers trying to cash in their invites, but it looks like they're down to asking for a couple of dimes now.
To say that Gmail's second-place to an iPod in terms of being a cultural phenomenon is an overstatement, I think.
So the thing about commodity PC market is not that prices keep going down: Performance keeps going up! So if you spend $2k on a computer today, and $2k on a computer next year, you get a computer roughly 110% better. Or upgrade the ram for $200. Then upgrade the video card for $300. Then buy a new hard drive for $300. Then replace the power supply for $80. Then get a new CPU for $150.
Actually, we're both right -- performance is going up while prices are going down on commodity PCs. Now it's happening on the Mac platform too. The market for old, used Macs is about to go kerblooey because no one's going to want to buy an old 500MHz G4 off of eBay because of the Mac mini. It's the exact same situation and doesn't have anything to do with some magical ability of the Mac to retain its value.
I understand what you're saying, but you're kinda missing my point. The reason PC prices go down is because the price of brand new PCs continue to drop. As a consumer, that's not a bad thing.
Look at it another way -- what's the value of a low-end Mac now that the Mac mini is out? You think there's a market for 400MHz G4s anymore? The used Mac market is about to experience the same depreciation as the PC market and that's a good thing for everybody.
It ain't paranoia, yo. From http://www.apple.com/macmini/ :
Mac mini offers plenty of juice to power your digital life, but you can kick it into overdrive with extras. Add the SuperDrive option to burn DVDs of your home movies or to make a backup of the music or audiobooks you buy at the iTunes Music Store. You can minimize the desktop clutter of cables with wireless connections. Surf wirelessly with an AirPort Extreme Card installed in your Mac mini. Or configure your Mac mini with internal Bluetooth to use wireless keyboards and mice. You can also choose up to 1GB RAM and increase the 40GB hard drive to 80GB. Some of these options must be installed by Apple at the factory; the rest can be added in-store at an Apple Store or an Apple authorized reseller.
Second I am a Navy Veteran (FTN & PAPERCLIP awards) whose skin crawled when Kerry gave his lifer "reporting for duty salute" ... something is not right with this dude ... thank you SwiftVets and POWS for Truth for confirming my gut feelings as a Navy Veteran about Kerry
In other words, the SBVfT told you what you wanted to hear. They've admitted that they're just pissed off that Kerry protested the Viet Nam war and were going to get him by any means necessary and they did.
Macs seem to hold their value really well so I don't feel bad about spending extra on it.
I've always found this to be a really weird argument. Who buys a computer because it "keeps its value" (read: replacing it is just as expensive as when I bought it)? The great thing about the commodity PC market is that prices keep going down. Sure, your old PC isn't worth anything, but you can get a spiffy new one for less money as well. As a consumer, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
I kinda like a world where a 3GHz P4 with a gig of RAM is less than a thousand bucks myself, but Mac folks seem to like that a top-end machine starts at about $1,500 because they have this illusion that it's an investment.